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Background: Evidence from a range of major public health incidents shows that neighbour-based action can have a critical role in emergency response, assistance and recovery. However, there is little research to date on neighbour-based action during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. This article reports on a survey of people engaged in supporting their neighbours in weeks three and four of the UK COVID-19 lockdown.

Methods: Members of area-based and community of interest COVID-19 support groups in the Bristol conurbation were invited to complete an online survey. Of 1,255 people who clicked on the survey link, 862 responded; of these, 539 responses were eligible for analysis.

Results: Respondents reported providing a wide range of support that went beyond health information, food and medical prescription assistance, to include raising morale through humour, creativity and acts of kindness and solidarity. A substantial proportion felt that they had become more involved in neighbourhood life following the lockdown and had an interest in becoming more involved in future. Neighbour support spanned all adult age groups, including older people categorised as being at-risk to the virus. With respect to most measures, there were no differences in the characteristics of support between respondents in areas of higher and lower deprivation. However, respondents from more deprived areas were more likely to state that they were involved in supporting certain vulnerable groups.

Conclusions: As with previous research on major social upheavals, our findings suggest that responses to the viral pandemic and associated social restrictions may increase existing social and health inequalities, and further research should explore this issue in more depth.

Healthcare policy-makers are implementing practices based on the logic of cost-opportunity to rationalize investments and resource consumption. The successful implementation of these practices depends on policy-makers’ capacity to involve professionals dispersed in the ecosystem, and who are unaccustomed to cooperating. Our case study investigates the institutional work pursued by the Lombardy Region to stimulate a Health Technology Assessment (HTA) program.

This chapter is based on a longitudinal case study of institutional change linked with a HTA program in the Lombardy Region. The HTA program initiatives were implemented during the 2009–2012 period. The case study is based on triangulating data from archival data, contents of the assessment forms and interviews with regional staff and experts.

The Lombardy Region implemented two distinct strategies, with mixed results. A strategy that was based on the formalization of the HTA program in a legislative direct through educational efforts did not obtain the commitment of the key actors in the relevant ecosystem. Subsequently, the Region implemented an ‘institutional work’ design strategy that included a combination of political, cultural, technical and structural work. This strategy stimulated local HTA experiments that might be used in the future to legitimize the full diffusion of the new practice in the ecosystem.

This study highlights a viable strategy of change that policy-makers can use to manage processes of institutional change in a professional ecosystem. The ‘institutional work’ strategy can support the establishment of new practices that incorporate the logic of cost-opportunity, which might rationalize the use of resources and improve investment decisions.

The study focusses on the complex interaction between ideological beliefs, culture and accounting by identifying during Benito Mussolini's time in power the contributions of accounting to the Italian Fascist repertoire of power in the cultural domain. It emphasises the importance of accounting in making the Alla Scala Opera House in Milan a vital institution in the creation of a Fascist national culture and identity which was meant to define the Fascist “Ethical State”.

The study adopts the Foucauldian concept of discourse in analysing the accounting practices of the Alla Scala Opera House.

Financial statements and related commentaries prepared by the Alla Scala Opera House were not primarily for ensuring good management and the minimisation of public funding in contrast to the practices and expectations of accounting in liberal States. Instead, the dominant Fascist discourse shaped the content and use of accounting and ensured that accounting practices could be a means to construct the Opera House as a “moral individual” that was to serve wider national interests consistent with the priorities of the Fascist Ethical State.

The study identifies how accounting can be mobilised for ideological purposes in different ways which are not limited to supporting discourses inspired by logics of efficiency and profit. The paper also draws attention to the contributions of accounting discourses in shaping the identity of an organisation consistent with the priorities of those who hold the supreme authority in a society.

The analysis of how the Fascist State sought to reinforce its power by making cultural institutions a critical part of this process provides the means to understand and unmask the taken-for-granted way in which discourses are created to promote power relations and related interests such as in the rise of far-right movements, most especially in weaker and more vulnerable countries at present.

Unlike most of the work on the relationship between culture and accounting which has emphasised liberal States, this study considers a non-liberal State and documents a use of accounting in the cultural domain which was not limited to promoting efficiency consistent with the priorities now recognised more recently of the New Public Management. It presents a micro-perspective on accounting as an ideological discourse by investigating the role of accounting in the exploitation of a cultural institution for political purposes.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a comprehensive theoretical framework to explain the different diffusion dynamics of a technology realized under an open source (OS) regime vs a technology realized under a closed-proprietary (CP) regime.

Following a systematic combining approach, theoretical predictions derived from literature on diffusion of innovation and on open innovation were matched with empirical observations derived from a case study of two mobile operation systems, which were released under different technological regimes.

This paper proposes a theoretical framework and a set of original theoretical propositions that can help to explain the differences in the diffusion dynamics of technologies that are released under different regimes (i.e. CP vs OS).

This paper provides managers a better understanding of the diffusion dynamics of technologies released according to an open innovation strategy. In addition, the empirical case study improves the understanding of an important industry (the MOS industry) that has not been fully investigated from the innovation diffusion perspective. Nevertheless, the efficacy and generalizability of the theoretical framework proposed in this paper require future empirical tests.

This paper makes an original contribution to the open innovation and innovation diffusion literature by linking, in a conceptual model, three antecedents of the diffusion of a new technology that previous literature has considered only separately: the regime under which the technology is released (OS vs CP), the contingencies related to the characteristics of the technology and to the network of its adopters, and the resulting barriers to adoption.

For firms using target costing, separating decision management from decision control helps to minimize the agency costs incurred throughout a product's economic life. Prior literature focuses on decision-management issues related to target costing, such as new product development (i.e., initiation) and production (i.e., implementation). In contrast, this article highlights the decision control aspects of target costing, which consist of ratifying product proposals and monitoring the product's implementation. While products initiated with target costing are chosen because they meet their allowable cost, product ratification requires assessing how well products contribute toward strategic goals, such as improving the firm's market value. To facilitate the ratification decision, this article develops an equation for determining a product's net present value (NPV) based on the same accounting data used during the initiation process. The article also describes monitoring a product's implementation through periodic comparisons to flexible budgets and a post-audit review at the end of the product's economic life.